4
For a long time I used to go to bed early. Sometimes, when I had put out
my candle, my eyes would close so quickly that I had not even time to
say "I'm going to sleep." And half an hour later the thought that it was time to go to sleep would awaken me; I would try to put away the book
which, I imagined, was still in my hands, and to blow out the light; I had
been thinking all the time, while I was asleep, of what I had just been
reading, but my thoughts had run into a channel of their own, until I my-
self seemed actually to have become the subject of my book: a church, a
quartet, the rivalry between François I and Charles V. This impression
would persist for some moments after I was awake; it did not disturb my
mind, but it lay like scales upon my eyes and prevented them from regis-
tering the fact that the candle was no longer burning. Then it would be-
gin to seem unintelligible, as the thoughts of a former existence must be
to a reincarnate spirit; the subject of my book would separate itself from
me, leaving me free to choose whether I would form part of it or no; and
at the same time my sight would return and I would be astonished to
find myself in a state of darkness, pleasant and restful enough for the
eyes, and even more, perhaps, for my mind, to which it appeared incom-
prehensible, without a cause, a matter dark indeed.
I would ask myself what o'clock it could be; I could hear the whistling
of trains, which, now nearer and now farther off, punctuating the dis-
tance like the note of a bird in a forest, shewed me in perspective the
deserted countryside through which a traveller would be hurrying to-
wards the nearest station: the path that he followed being fixed for ever
in his memory by the general excitement due to being in a strange place,
to doing unusual things, to the last words of conversation, to farewells
exchanged beneath an unfamiliar lamp which echoed still in his ears
amid the silence of the night; and to the delightful prospect of being once
again at home.
I would lay my cheeks gently against the comfortable cheeks of my
pillow, as plump and blooming as the cheeks of babyhood. Or I would
strike a match to look at my watch. Nearly midnight. The hour when an
invalid, who has been obliged to start on a journey and to sleep in a
strange hotel, awakens in a moment of illness and sees with glad relief a
streak of daylight shewing under his bedroom door. Oh, joy of joys! it is
morning. The servants will be about in a minute: he can ring, and some
one will come to look after him. The thought of being made comfortable
gives him strength to endure his pain. He is certain he heard footsteps:
they come nearer, and then die away. The ray of light beneath his door is
extinguished. It is midnight; some one has turned out the gas; the last
5
servant has gone to bed, and he must lie all night in agony with no one
to bring him any help.
I would fall asleep, and often I would be awake again for short
snatches only, just long enough to hear the regular creaking of the wains-
cot, or to open my eyes to settle the shifting kaleidoscope of the dark-
ness, to savour, in an instantaneous flash of perception, the sleep which
lay heavy upon the furniture, the room, the whole surroundings of
which I formed but an insignificant part and whose unconsciousness I
should very soon return to share. Or, perhaps, while I was asleep I had
returned without the least effort to an earlier stage in my life, now for
ever outgrown; and had come under the thrall of one of my childish ter-
rors, such as that old terror of my great-uncle's pulling my curls, which
was effectually dispelled on the day—the dawn of a new era to me—on
which they were finally cropped from my head. I had forgotten that
event during my sleep; I remembered it again immediately I had suc-
ceeded in making myself wake up to escape my great-uncle's fingers;
still, as a measure of precaution, I would bury the whole of my head in
the pillow before returning to the world of dreams.
Sometimes, too, just as Eve was created from a rib of Adam, so a wo-
man would come into existence while I was sleeping, conceived from
some strain in the position of my limbs. Formed by the appetite that I
was on the point of gratifying, she it was, I imagined, who offered me
that gratification. My body, conscious that its own warmth was permeat-
ing hers, would strive to become one with her, and I would awake. The
rest of humanity seemed very remote in comparison with this woman
whose company I had left but a moment ago: my cheek was still warm
with her kiss, my body bent beneath the weight of hers. If, as would
sometimes happen, she had the appearance of some woman whom I had
known in waking hours, I would abandon myself altogether to the sole
quest of her, like people who set out on a journey to see with their own
eyes some city that they have always longed to visit, and imagine that
they can taste in reality what has charmed their fancy. And then, gradu-
ally, the memory of her would dissolve and vanish, until I had forgotten
the maiden of my dream.
When a man is asleep, he has in a circle round him the chain of the
hours, the sequence of the years, the order of the heavenly host. Instinct-
ively, when he awakes, he looks to these, and in an instant reads off his
own position on the earth's surface and the amount of time that has
elapsed during his slumbers; but this ordered procession is apt to grow
confused, and to break its ranks. Suppose that, towards morning, after a
6
night of insomnia, sleep descends upon him while he is reading, in quite
a different position from that in which he normally goes to sleep, he has
only to lift his arm to arrest the sun and turn it back in its course, and, at
the moment of waking, he will have no idea of the time, but will con-
clude that he has just gone to bed. Or suppose that he gets drowsy in
some even more abnormal position; sitting in an armchair, say, after din-
ner: then the world will fall topsy-turvy from its orbit, the magic chair
will carry him at full speed through time and space, and when he opens
his eyes again he will imagine that he went to sleep months earlier and
in some far distant country. But for me it was enough if, in my own bed,
my sleep was so heavy as completely to relax my consciousness; for then
I lost all sense of the place in which I had gone to sleep, and when I
awoke at midnight, not knowing where I was, I could not be sure at first
who I was; I had only the most rudimentary sense of existence, such as
may lurk and flicker in the depths of an animal's consciousness; I was
more destitute of human qualities than the cave-dweller; but then the
memory, not yet of the place in which I was, but of various other places
where I had lived, and might now very possibly be, would come like a
rope let down from heaven to draw me up out of the abyss of not-being,
from which I could never have escaped by myself: in a flash I would tra-
verse and surmount centuries of civilisation, and out of a half-visualised
succession of oil-lamps, followed by shirts with turned-down collars,
would put together by degrees the component parts of my ego.
Perhaps the immobility of the things that surround us is forced upon
them by our conviction that they are themselves, and not anything else,
and by the immobility of our conceptions of them. For it always
happened that when I awoke like this, and my mind struggled in an un-
successful attempt to discover where I was, everything would be moving
round me through the darkness: things, places, years. My body, still too
heavy with sleep to move, would make an effort to construe the form
which its tiredness took as an orientation of its various members, so as to
induce from that where the wall lay and the furniture stood, to piece to-
gether and to give a name to the house in which it must be living. Its
memory, the composite memory of its ribs, knees, and shoulder-blades
offered it a whole series of rooms in which it had at one time or another
slept; while the unseen walls kept changing, adapting themselves to the
shape of each successive room that it remembered, whirling madly
through the darkness. And even before my brain, lingering in considera-
tion of when things had happened and of what they had looked like, had
collected sufficient impressions to enable it to identify the room, it, my
7
body, would recall from each room in succession what the bed was like,
where the doors were, how daylight came in at the windows, whether
there was a passage outside, what I had had in my mind when I went to
sleep, and had found there when I awoke. The stiffened side underneath
my body would, for instance, in trying to fix its position, imagine itself to
be lying, face to the wall, in a big bed with a canopy; and at once I would
say to myself, "Why, I must have gone to sleep after all, and Mamma
never came to say good night!" for I was in the country with my grand-
father, who died years ago; and my body, the side upon which I was ly-
ing, loyally preserving from the past an impression which my mind
should never have forgotten, brought back before my eyes the glimmer-
ing flame of the night-light in its bowl of Bohemian glass, shaped like an
urn and hung by chains from the ceiling, and the chimney-piece of Siena
marble in my bedroom at Combray, in my great-aunt's house, in those
far distant days which, at the moment of waking, seemed present
without being clearly denned, but would become plainer in a little while
when I was properly awake.
Then would come up the memory of a fresh position; the wall slid
away in another direction; I was in my room in Mme. de Saint-Loup's
house in the country; good heavens, it must be ten o'clock, they will have
finished dinner! I must have overslept myself, in the little nap which I al-
ways take when I come in from my walk with Mme. de Saint-Loup, be-
fore dressing for the evening. For many years have now elapsed since
the Combray days, when, coming in from the longest and latest walks, I
would still be in time to see the reflection of the sunset glowing in the
panes of my bedroom window. It is a very different kind of existence at
Tansonville now with Mme. de Saint-Loup, and a different kind of pleas-
ure that I now derive from taking walks only in the evenings, from visit-
ing by moonlight the roads on which I used to play, as a child, in the
sunshine; while the bedroom, in which I shall presently fall asleep in-
stead of dressing for dinner, from afar off I can see it, as we return from
our walk, with its lamp shining through the window, a solitary beacon in
the night.
These shifting and confused gusts of memory never lasted for more
than a few seconds; it often happened that, in my spell of uncertainty as
to where I was, I did not distinguish the successive theories of which that
uncertainty was composed any more than, when we watch a horse run-
ning, we isolate the successive positions of its body as they appear upon
a bioscope. But I had seen first one and then another of the rooms in
which I had slept during my life, and in the end I would revisit them all
8
in the long course of my waking dream: rooms in winter, where on going
to bed I would at once bury my head in a nest, built up out of the most
diverse materials, the corner of my pillow, the top of my blankets, a
piece of a shawl, the edge of my bed, and a copy of an evening paper, all
of which things I would contrive, with the infinite patience of birds
building their nests, to cement into one whole; rooms where, in a keen
frost, I would feel the satisfaction of being shut in from the outer world
(like the sea-swallow which builds at the end of a dark tunnel and is kept
warm by the surrounding earth), and where, the fire keeping in all night,
I would sleep wrapped up, as it were, in a great cloak of snug and sa-
voury air, shot with the glow of the logs which would break out again in
flame: in a sort of alcove without walls, a cave of warmth dug out of the
heart of the room itself, a zone of heat whose boundaries were constantly
shifting and altering in temperature as gusts of air ran across them to
strike freshly upon my face, from the corners of the room, or from parts
near the window or far from the fireplace which had therefore remained
cold—or rooms in summer, where I would delight to feel myself a part
of the warm evening, where the moonlight striking upon the half-
opened shutters would throw down to the foot of my bed its enchanted
ladder; where I would fall asleep, as it might be in the open air, like a tit-
mouse which the breeze keeps poised in the focus of a sunbeam—or
sometimes the Louis XVI room, so cheerful that I could never feel really
unhappy, even on my first night in it: that room where the slender
columns which lightly supported its ceiling would part, ever so grace-
fully, to indicate where the bed was and to keep it separate; sometimes
again that little room with the high ceiling, hollowed in the form of a
pyramid out of two separate storeys, and partly walled with mahogany,
in which from the first moment my mind was drugged by the unfamiliar
scent of flowering grasses, convinced of the hostility of the violet cur-
tains and of the insolent indifference of a clock that chattered on at the
top of its voice as though I were not there; while a strange and pitiless
mirror with square feet, which stood across one corner of the room,
cleared for itself a site I had not looked to find tenanted in the quiet sur-
roundings of my normal field of vision: that room in which my mind,
forcing itself for hours on end to leave its moorings, to elongate itself up-
wards so as to take on the exact shape of the room, and to reach to the
summit of that monstrous funnel, had passed so many anxious nights
while my body lay stretched out in bed, my eyes staring upwards, my
ears straining, my nostrils sniffing uneasily, and my heart beating; until
custom had changed the colour of the curtains, made the clock keep
9
quiet, brought an expression of pity to the cruel, slanting face of the
glass, disguised or even completely dispelled the scent of flowering
grasses, and distinctly reduced the apparent loftiness of the ceiling. Cus-
tom! that skilful but unhurrying manager who begins by torturing the
mind for weeks on end with her provisional arrangements; whom the
mind, for all that, is fortunate in discovering, for without the help of cus-
tom it would never contrive, by its own efforts, to make any room seem
habitable.
Certainly I was now well awake; my body had turned about for the
last time and the good angel of certainty had made all the surrounding
objects stand still, had set me down under my bedclothes, in my bed-
room, and had fixed, approximately in their right places in the uncertain
light, my chest of drawers, my writing-table, my fireplace, the window
overlooking the street, and both the doors. But it was no good my know-
ing that I was not in any of those houses of which, in the stupid moment
of waking, if I had not caught sight exactly, I could still believe in their
possible presence; for memory was now set in motion; as a rule I did not
attempt to go to sleep again at once, but used to spend the greater part of
the night recalling our life in the old days at Combray with my great-
aunt, at Balbec, Paris, Doncières, Venice, and the rest; remembering
again all the places and people that I had known, what I had actually
seen of them, and what others had told me.
At Combray, as every afternoon ended, long before the time when I
should have to go up to bed, and to lie there, unsleeping, far from my
mother and grandmother, my bedroom became the fixed point on which
my melancholy and anxious thoughts were centred. Some one had had
the happy idea of giving me, to distract me on evenings when I seemed
abnormally wretched, a magic lantern, which used to be set on top of my
lamp while we waited for dinner-time to come: in the manner of the
master-builders and glass-painters of gothic days it substituted for the
opaqueness of my walls an impalpable iridescence, supernatural phe-
nomena of many colours, in which legends were depicted, as on a shift-
ing and transitory window. But my sorrows were only increased, be-
cause this change of lighting destroyed, as nothing else could have done,
the customary impression I had formed of my room, thanks to which the
room itself, but for the torture of having to go to bed in it, had become
quite endurable. For now I no longer recognised it, and I became uneasy,
as though I were in a room in some hotel or furnished lodging, in a place
where I had just arrived, by train, for the first time.
10
Riding at a jerky trot, Golo, his mind filled with an infamous design,
issued from the little three-cornered forest which dyed dark-green the
slope of a convenient hill, and advanced by leaps and bounds towards
the castle of poor Geneviève de Brabant. This castle was cut off short by
a curved line which was in fact the circumference of one of the transpar-
ent ovals in the slides which were pushed into position through a slot in
the lantern. It was only the wing of a castle, and in front of it stretched a
moor on which Geneviève stood, lost in contemplation, wearing a blue
girdle. The castle and the moor were yellow, but I could tell their colour
without waiting to see them, for before the slides made their appearance
the old-gold sonorous name of Brabant had given me an unmistakable
clue. Golo stopped for a moment and listened sadly to the little speech
read aloud by my great-aunt, which he seemed perfectly to understand,
for he modified his attitude with a docility not devoid of a degree of
majesty, so as to conform to the indications given in the text; then he
rode away at the same jerky trot. And nothing could arrest his slow pro-
gress. If the lantern were moved I could still distinguish Golo's horse ad-
vancing across the window-curtains, swelling out with their curves and
diving into their folds. The body of Golo himself, being of the same su-
pernatural
substance
as
his
steed's,
overcame
all
material
obstacles—everything that seemed to bar his way—by taking each as it
might be a skeleton and embodying it in himself: the door-handle, for in-
stance, over which, adapting itself at once, would float invincibly his red
cloak or his pale face, never losing its nobility or its melancholy, never
shewing any sign of trouble at such a transubstantiation.
And, indeed, I found plenty of charm in these bright projections,
which seemed to have come straight out of a Merovingian past, and to
shed around me the reflections of such ancient history. But I cannot ex-
press the discomfort I felt at such an intrusion of mystery and beauty in-
to a room which I had succeeded in filling with my own personality until
I thought no more of the room than of myself. The anaesthetic effect of
custom being destroyed, I would begin to think and to feel very melan-
choly things. The door-handle of my room, which was different to me
from all the other doorhandles in the world, inasmuch as it seemed to
open of its own accord and without my having to turn it, so unconscious
had its manipulation become; lo and behold, it was now an astral body
for Golo. And as soon as the dinner-bell rang I would run down to the
dining-room, where the big hanging lamp, ignorant of Golo and Blue-
beard but well acquainted with my family and the dish of stewed beef,
shed the same light as on every other evening; and I would fall into the
11
arms of my mother, whom the misfortunes of Geneviève de Brabant had
made all the dearer to me, just as the crimes of Golo had driven me to a
more than ordinarily scrupulous examination of my own conscience.
But after dinner, alas, I was soon obliged to leave Mamma, who stayed
talking with the others, in the garden if it was fine, or in the little parlour where everyone took shelter when it was wet. Everyone except my
grandmother, who held that "It is a pity to shut oneself indoors in the
country," and used to carry on endless discussions with my father on the
very wettest days, because he would send me up to my room with a
book instead of letting me stay out of doors. "That is not the way to make him strong and active," she would say sadly, "especially this little man, who needs all the strength and character that he can get." My father
would shrug his shoulders and study the barometer, for he took an in-
terest in meteorology, while my mother, keeping very quiet so as not to
disturb him, looked at him with tender respect, but not too hard, not
wishing to penetrate the mysteries of his superior mind. But my grand-
mother, in all weathers, even when the rain was coming down in tor-
rents and Françoise had rushed indoors with the precious wicker arm-
chairs, so that they should not get soaked—you would see my grand-
mother pacing the deserted garden, lashed by the storm, pushing back
her grey hair in disorder so that her brows might be more free to imbibe
the life-giving draughts of wind and rain. She would say, "At last one
can breathe!" and would run up and down the soaking paths—too
straight and symmetrical for her liking, owing to the want of any feeling
for nature in the new gardener, whom my father had been asking all
morning if the weather were going to improve—with her keen, jerky
little step regulated by the various effects wrought upon her soul by the
intoxication of the storm, the force of hygiene, the stupidity of my educa-
tion and of symmetry in gardens, rather than by any anxiety (for that
was quite unknown to her) to save her plum-coloured skirt from the
spots of mud under which it would gradually disappear to a depth
which always provided her maid with a fresh problem and filled her
with fresh despair.
When these walks of my grandmother's took place after dinner there
was one thing which never failed to bring her back to the house: that was
if (at one of those points when the revolutions of her course brought her,
moth-like, in sight of the lamp in the little parlour where the liqueurs
were set out on the card-table) my great-aunt called out to her: "Bathilde!
Come in and stop your husband from drinking brandy!" For, simply to
tease her (she had brought so foreign a type of mind into my father's
12
family that everyone made a joke of it), my great-aunt used to make my
grandfather, who was forbidden liqueurs, take just a few drops. My poor
grandmother would come in and beg and implore her husband not to
taste the brandy; and he would become annoyed and swallow his few
drops all the same, and she would go out again sad and discouraged, but
still smiling, for she was so humble and so sweet that her gentleness to-
wards others, and her continual subordination of herself and of her own
troubles, appeared on her face blended in a smile which, unlike those
seen on the majority of human faces, had no trace in it of irony, save for
herself, while for all of us kisses seemed to spring from her eyes, which
could not look upon those she loved without yearning to bestow upon
them passionate caresses. The torments inflicted on her by my great-
aunt, the sight of my grandmother's vain entreaties, of her in her weak-
ness conquered before she began, but still making the futile endeavour to
wean my grandfather from his liqueur-glass—all these were things of the
sort to which, in later years, one can grow so well accustomed as to smile
at them, to take the tormentor's side with a. happy determination which
deludes one into the belief that it is not, really, tormenting; but in those
days they filled me with such horror that I longed to strike my great-
aunt. And yet, as soon as I heard her "Bathilde! Come in and stop your
husband from drinking brandy!" in my cowardice I became at once a
man, and did what all we grown men do when face to face with suffer-
ing and injustice; I preferred not